The Greatest Tragedy
by Infinity Complex
Summary: …is when a nation has to see their citizens cry.  It is only during the Blitz that England comes to realize just how far a nation will go to stop their children's tears.


**A/N: This just popped into my head, and I could not get it out. There are not enough fics about the lengths countries go to for their citizens, and I absobloodylutely **_**adore**_** England (he and America are my favorite characters) so why not write something about him? **

**I do not own Hetalia. Also, I am working on **_**Liberty Boys **_**and **_**1607**_**, so do not worry.**

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><p><strong>The Greatest Tragedy<strong>

_…is when a nation has to see their citizens cry._

By Infinity Complex

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><p><strong>November 20, 1940 – West Ham, London<strong>

It was the perfect embodiment of "too little, too late" – the government had not done enough to help the people of London in the first place, and they had realized the danger of simply waiting for an air strike far to late for anything substantial to be accomplished.

There were not enough words to describe the resulting misery.

Anti-aircraft guns sounded at irregular intervals, their shooting sharp and near or muffled with distance; the occasional scrap of shrapnel fell from the sky. Fires were raging all around the city, bombs exploding, rubble and ash and the occasional body blocking the streets, eliminating any hope of getting help to those who so desperately needed it. The streets themselves were nearly lifeless – their only inhabitants were those unlucky enough not to be situated in a bomb shelter.

And the night sky over London was never the black or navy blue it should have been, just as the daytime sky was not the bright cerulean; instead, it glowed an orangey-red that was absolutely sickening, if only because its presence meant that the city still burned.

England imagined this rather resembled Graveyard of Nations, although no living country personification had ever seen it. Despite the fact that no nation liked to ponder their death – it was not only their own death, but also the death of a government, a culture, a history, _a people_ – they had all wondered what their final resting place would look like. And this vision, of a shattered London, had reshaped his personal image of it. Gone were the delicate fields and rolling hills and patchwork landscapes he had imagined before; the image of his grave had been reshaped as a vast, twisted jungle of decaying cities, dead citizens, and decrepit morale.

But he did not have much time to think on this horrible grave, as the cracked pavement and upturned cobblestone roads inhabited reality as well as his thoughts, and he desperately needed to navigate _this_ graveyard and find some sort of safety.

More important, however, was finding the reassurance that 10 Downing Street had not been bombed; that Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey were still standing; that neither King George VI nor Winston Churchill were dead…

He stumbled on a crack in the pavement, leaving his fingers to scrape at the edge of a crumbling brick wall several times before actually managing to grab hold of it and hoist himself up. It was only a matter of seconds before he felt his arm trembling with the strain of keeping his entire body upright, and he was quick to remove his hand and lean against the wall instead. He was grateful for the support, for if he sat he doubted he would ever get up.

The abrupt loss of his hand dislodged the bricks he had been holding; they fell to the ground, joining their scorched brothers in the rubble heap at the base of what had once been a building. But it was hard to pay any attention to the crumbling wall as the pain overwhelmed England, who, no longer tasked with the duty of remaining upright, did not have to brush aside that sensation of being aflame that most certainly would have brought him to his knees. He clutched at his chest, wincing as the fabric of his shirt touched the fresh burns that lingered there, and feeling warm, sticky liquid slip between his fingers and down his hand. His skin felt slick with blood and slimy to the touch, but his breathing, in contrast, was rough and ragged, as though the smoke that clogged the London air was suffocating him.

The bright flashes of exploding bombs would momentarily blind him, and the accompanying, thundering booms in the distance would ring loudly in his ears. Looking up, he saw a round silhouette, black against the red sky, likely a bomb or piece of shrapnel falling to earth. It exploded in a firestorm upon impact – an incendiary then, that was new. It performed its duty well: another building was on fire just down the street, what appeared to be an apartment building, and England jerked forward at the pain of the new burns marking his skin.

There were not many people in the apartment building, most had been smart enough to seek refuge in a bomb shelter that night, but the shouts of those few who had remained and were now caught in the inferno rang through his mind with horrifying clarity.

"Shite. I don't have a chance of reaching a bomb shelter at this rate." He smiled bitterly as he spoke, knowing the nearest entrance to the Tube was blocks away, an impossible distance to cover when making any movement was synonymous with searing pain shooting through his entire body. His moment of self-depreciation was ended, however, by the loud clanging of a collapsing metal fire escape, and the sight of a dark shape emerging from the accumulating rubble, fleeing the building that had been ravaged by the incendiary just moments ago. It was a young child, a girl of no more than ten years, clutching a stuffed rabbit and crying hopelessly.

England was suddenly overcome by the desire to go to her, to comfort her.

That was not a good idea, he knew, and he immediately tried to banish the notion from his thoughts. Moving was difficult, and he should be directing any energy he had left towards getting to a bomb shelter: as a nation he could not die, but sustaining any damage from a nearby explosion in his current state could easily put him in a coma for the duration of the war.

Even worse, it was entirely feasible that he would never wake up.

But another look at the girl told him that he could not just turn and walk away. The stuffed rabbit had fallen from her grasp as she fell to her hands and knees, shrieking in pain and scrambling to stand once again as she finally noticed the angry burns that covered the majority of her legs.

She had likely just lost her parents in that fire. No one would leave his or her child alone in such a dangerous landscape, no parent would have the heart to do that. They would have stayed home in their tenement with their daughter, fighting to the very end to make sure that the girl would have a chance to escape and live, before finally becoming nothing more than the screams that haunted England's thoughts. And that tenement building was her home, she was losing that too; it was the only way to explain the sheer devastation her expression conveyed.

This was a miserable, frightened, crying child so desperately needing somewhere _safe_, and he could not leave her to simply fend for herself even if he wanted to. He would not be able to leave any of his people in that state.

So he walked up to her – walked, as in his normal gait, refusing to limp or hobble or even _wince_, because this was one of his citizens and they needed their nation to be strong for them even as their cities crumbled. His body held out until the very last minute, when he fell to his knees (he meant to kneel, not bloody_ collapse_) right in front of the sobbing girl.

He grabbed her left hand, her right being too badly burned to cause anything but pain in trying to touch it, retrieved the stuffed rabbit from where it rested on the asphalt, and held it out to her. After arranging his face into what he hoped was a gentle, comforting smile, he opened his mouth to speak.

"Whatever is the matter, child?"

Though she immediately snatched the rabbit, clutching it close with her burnt right hand, there was a few seconds before she registered the voice, and the person who accompanied it. That was when she first noticed him, her eyes too focused on the tenement building burning to the ground and her mind too lost in grief to register his presence before.

She saw a battered man, whose face was covered in grime and soot, and whose hair was so dirty and matted that one could not even discern its color anymore. His clothes and skin were smeared with his own blood, and underneath the red one could see the angry blistering pink of second degree burns rising out of the collar of what was once a white shirt; she also could make out, if only barely, some of the telltale black flesh of third degree burns, hinting at even worse injuries underneath hidden by the fabric.

He knelt there before her, exhausted and on the brink of collapse, making a frightening, despondent picture.

But the man wore a gentle smile and looked up at her with comforting eyes that recalled images of the green, rolling hills of her grandparents' home in the English countryside and the harsh green of a soldier's uniform all at once. Though he had the strict posture of a ruler, always strong in the face of such great misery, he also wore the gentle expression of the parents she had just lost in the fire, and he had a feel of comfort achingly close to that of her home that was just destroyed.

The girl's tears ceased flowing, if only for a moment, to look at him and weakly try to mimic his smile. It was an awkward expression, as if she had forgotten how to arrange her face to portray any emotion remotely close to happiness.

But England considered it a small victory, one just as important as the war being fought in the air above them.

Maybe even more so.

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><p><em>A man does what he must - in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures - and that is the basis of all human morality.<em>

_~Winston Churchill_

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><p><strong>The London Blitz was the German Luftwaffe's continuous nightly bombing of London from September 7, 1940 to May 10, 1941. Its primary purpose was targeting English morale by bombing shipping and manufacturing essential to the war effort. West Ham, a part of Greater London with a very concentrated industrial presence, was one of the most heavily targeted areas of the city. Though the German bombers were not supposed to directly attack civilian populations, in November and December 1940 the Luftwaffe started using incendiary devices and mines instead of bombs, resulting in less control over collateral damage and more civilian deaths. 43,000 English civilians ultimately died.<strong>

**Despite warnings that England's sprawling cities would be difficult to defend in the case of an air raid, the government did surprisingly little to prepare the English citizens from such an attack. The government-built bomb shelters were ineffective, and so most shelters were either privately owned (not an option for the working class), or unused tunnels of the Tube. There were still times where people would decide to wait out the night in their house instead.**

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